Kwame Dawes is a poet, actor, editor, critic, musician and professor of English at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. He has written dozens of books. Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana in 1962 and grew up in Jamaica where he attended Jamaica College and the University of the West Indies at Mona. He studied and taught in New Brunswick on a Commonwealth Scholarship to Canada. Since 1992 he has been teaching at the University of South Carolina. He is a Professor in English and also Distinguished Poet in Residence, Director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and Director of the USC Arts Institute. He collaborated with San Francisco-based writer and composer Kevin Simmonds on Wisteria: Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country which debuted at Royal Festival Hall in 2006 and featured sopranos Valetta Brinson and Valerie Johnson. As a Ph.D. student at the University of New Brunswick he was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Brunswickan. He is currently the faculty advisor for the publication, Yemassee.
